Forgotten Dairies
Who Talk Say You No Get Choice? -By Swandy Banta
Whitney Elizabeth Houston was an American singer and actress. She’s being acclaimed by Guinness World Records as the most awarded female artist of all time. Whitney released nine music albums which sold in millions. She could sing.
Then she met, fell in love and married Bobby Brown who was alleged to have introduced her to drugs. The marriage became turbulent and ended in a divorce.
Whitney was later killed by what was believed to have been a drowning accident induced by drug over dose.
So not too long ago, I and my Ghost Friend were listening to one of Whitney’s Albums, and then a conversation ensued thus….
Me: But Bobby Brown ruined Whitney’s life Oooo. She was a good girl until he came along
GF: So what did he do to her?
Me: He introduced her to drugs; she became unstable and later lost her life. To make matters worse, dude is busy living his life like nothing happened
GF: Hell No! Bobby Brown did her no wrong. She had the choice to do drugs or walk away from it.
Sigh! GF was right but I couldn’t help reminisce on the choices we make at a time in life when we think it doesn’t matter what we do. In retrospect what we sometimes think is enjoyable and fulfilling could be the same thing that gets the best of us when defining moments of life come.
Whitney was the best. I imagine she would have made a lot more out of life if she had made the right choices.
Then I began to think more deeply. It’s all about choice. Every single day we choose…
Choose when to wake up
Choose what to wear
Choose what to eat
Choose where we go to
Choose what we say
Choose what we listen to
Choose what we read
Choose friends and acquaintances
Choose who or what we worship
I could go on and on.
My point exactly is that what eventually becomes of us is a sum total of all the choices we have made over a period of time.
Take a peep at five years from now. I can tell you categorically that all you need to do to have a fair idea of what your life will be like is to take a critical look at the choices you are making today.
Let’s take Whitney for instance. What would have been different if she had chosen to say NO to drugs?
Suffice to say that reports have it that Whitney got involved with drugs during her teenage years with her brothers, contrary to popular opinion that Bobby Brown roped her in.
The story gets even more interesting when it’s reported that she was involved with her assistant Robyn Crawford for decades in a lesbian affair for many years.
It now becomes obvious that Whitney and Bobby were enablers of each other and not that he influenced her.
What would have been different if they had chosen differently?
Maybe, just maybe, Bobby Christina (their daughter) would not have ended up the way she did. Just like her mom. Maybe Whitney may have lived longer, achieved more milestones in music and sang more beautiful songs and continued to inspire her fans worldwide.
Have you realized that most times we have an affinity for danger?
That friend or habit everyone says is not good for you is the one you are likely to have an affinity for.
Recently the story was told about the 17 year old boy who drowned in a swimming pool while his friends watched. As I read through his story I wondered what would have happened if he had chosen a different set of friends.
Well he chose these guys who watched him drown, picked his money and abandoned his floating corpse in the pool all on the lame premise that he loved to show off because his parents were rich.
But we are told that he paid their fees to the pool, bought all they ate and drank as they swam.
All he got in return for his choice were friends who let him drown.
For Whitney it was a complex combination of choices. Doing drugs, having a form of unusual sexuality and enduring a tumultuous marriage for 14 years were enough recipe for disaster. It was only a matter of time before her choices would sum up and determine an end. What we saw at the end was an accidental drowning in her Beverly Hills Hilton Hotel bath tub on that fateful day.
Sometimes when I reflect on the power choices have in shaping our life outcomes I become scared. The truth is that even the seemingly insignificant choices we make have the capability of determining an outcome we never imagined.
A friend of mine told me a story of how he woke up one Saturday morning feeling lazy. He needed to get to a busy part of town to fix his phone. He thought since it was a quick errand it didn’t matter much what he wore. When he got town, suddenly a police van parked and rounded him up with some other boys. He told how his saving grace was when they got to the station and asked everyone to identify themselves and he had his office ID card in his wallet. It was simply his choice of how to dress that morning that determined this particular outcome for him.
He recalls how upon arrival to the police station he realized that he didn’t really look different from the other guys who had been arrested alongside him. In retrospect he acknowledges he really looked shabby that day and didn’t even comb his hair.
We need to decide to by default become deliberately consciousness of always weighing our options by learning to seeing the end from the beginning in every situation before we choose.
A good understanding of cause and effect of our choices makes an excellent guide in determining what we choose.
We need to ask ourselves at any point in time if we will be okay with the outcome our choices before we decide what to choose.
I agree that our impulses are usually at their best at the time a seemingly juicy offer lies before us, but if we have activated a default mode of “see the end from the beginning” it energizes us to make the right choices in spite of how we feel at the time.
When the results of right choices begin to yield, it gradually becomes easier and easier for us to consistently choose correctly.
My litmus test for choosing is usually what I call my sixth sense, Intuition. Trust me most times when we choose wrongly we feel it within us that we are not on course, but because we have our other senses locked on the main alternative we disregard out intuition.
The thing is every day we sleep and wake up we are making choices. Not choosing is a choice. If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it, because it’s not right!
